Hitachi’s hefty hard drive

The terabyte – tera for trillion, but also, apparently, from the Greek meaning “monster.”

That takes the lead from Seagate Technology, which until now made the biggest hard drive, at 750 gigabytes.

To gauge the size of a terabyte — get used to the abbreviation 1 TB — Hitachi offers up a few boasts. One terabyte can hold:

* 250,000 songs on MP3s, at 4 megabytes each — enough to listen for two straight years without hearing the same song twice; or

* 500 full-length Hollywood movies; or

* 1 million electronic books (figuring that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is a 1 MB ebook); or

* 56 million pages of text, which if printed and stacked up, would reach 3.5 miles high.

So that’s big. But the cost is not. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 will go on sale in the first quarter of 2007 for $399.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will come in both an internal version, aimed at high end gamers and high performance desktop PC users, and an external device, mostly for backing up lots of files. Future versions also include a CinemaStar version specifically designed for digital video recorders, due out in the second quarter, and an enterprise version, due out in the second quarter as well, but whose name is not yet released.

The proliferation of digital video is “absolutely an influence” in developing the new machine, according to Doug Pickford, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ director of market and product strategy, but it’s not the only factor. “The proliferation of data and the need to centralize and make data available for devices throughout the home and enterprise, wherever it might be,” is driving the need for ever greater storage capacity.

One terabyte “is the natural evolution of the capacity points that have been delivered prior to it,” Pickford said. “Hitachi delivered a 500 GB drive in May 2005. We decided to skip the next capacity point of 750 GB to get to 1 terabyte first, realizing and believing that 1 TB is a much more important and significant milestone than 750 GB.”

Maybe so, but don’t think Hitachi will have the lead alone for long. ZDNet reported in August that Seagate, which released its 750 GB drive last April, expects to put out its 1 TB hard drive early this year as well.